Annabelle scribbled it all down as I rattled off the litany of skills I’d picked up, then stopped suddenly when I mentioned Thaumaturgy. Her head slowly rose up and I could see pure, burning obsession behind the eyes that bore into me over those adorable librarian glasses when she asked, no, demanded that I teach it to her.
Akari wanted to know how quickly I could learn a skill. Annabelle had a couple I hadn’t picked up yet, so I asked her to demonstrate Magical Research to me. She took us into an underground area beneath the pagoda I never even knew existed, and into a large chamber sealed behind a thick, metal door sealed with several sturdy locking mechanisms. I asked what was so valuable in there that merited so much security, and Akari explained that it wasn’t meant to stop people from coming in.
“You saw her explosion. That was a tiny fraction of what she can do when she goes all out. Now imagine what would happen if something she was tinkering with accidentally went off with that kind of power.”
“It’s not security, it’s containment,” I said. “So she doesn’t blow up the entire arena and everything around it.”
"It's bound to happen eventually," Akari said, nodding.
“Can you please stop talking about me like I’m not here?” Annabelle said.
Looking around the interior of the sealed chamber, I recognized her Artifice forge amid the very organized mess of books and apparati that would’ve been perfectly at home in any mad scientist’s lab. Annabelle's long purple ponytail bounced as she perched herself on a stool in front of a long table covered in diagrams of magic circles.
She showed me a piece of paper with a partially-completed magic circle drawn on it, then pushed her glasses up on her nose and started explaining how the exact symbols and patterns in a magic circle — runes she called them — contained the recipe, as it were, for the spell or effect it created.
Her Magical Research skill was how she came up with new spells by figuring out the right combination of runes and how to incorporate them into a new magic circle to achieve the desired effect. She called the circles formations.
System: You know Magical Research
“Okay, I got it,” I said, then took a blank piece of paper and sketched out the circle for the levitation spell that she’d used to float down from the top of the pagoda, the same one I’d recreated to lift everyone out of the catacombs. I then described the various runes in it and how they worked together to create the effect.
“Hold on,” Akari said. “You’re saying you didn’t understand this when we came down here.”
“I’d never even heard of runes and formations here before this.”
“But now you know it.”
“Just the basics.”
“Anna, how long did it take you to learn the basics?”
Annabelle had been staring silently at the circle I’d drawn. Akari snapped her fingers in front of her sister’s face. “Hello?”
“Months,” she said. “It took me months to get to this point and I was considered a genius.”
Akari whistled between her teeth. “You weren’t kidding, you really do learn fast.”
“Honestly, it’s not natural talent, it’s all thanks to the ability I was given. And Magical Theory is a very complicated skill so it took me a bit longer than usual. Usually I learn things a lot faster, depending on what they are. Without Annabelle's explanation it would’ve taken longer. Oddly enough, the skill that took me the longest to learn was Tea Ceremony.”
“What about my sorcery,” Annabelle said. “How long did it take to learn that?”
“That’s different. Skills I learn after watching someone do them a while using Good At Everything, but your sorcery is classified as a power. Thanks to Versatility For The Win I could copy it the moment I saw you make that first magic circle. Right now, I only know a few spells, just the ones I’ve seen you perform.”
A purple magic circle formation appeared in the air nearby.
“Can you tell me what spell this is?” Annabelle said.
“I’ve never seen it before, but some of the runes in it are similar to the energy blast formations you were using yesterday. If I had to guess, it might be another spell like that.”
A whole lot of tiny purple dart-like energy slivers shot from the circle and hit the wall.
I went over to the formation and pointed at a repeating pattern of runes around its outer edge. “Are these the ones that create multiple missiles?”
“How did you figure that out?” Annabelle said.
“Fast learner,” I said. Then I created an identical magic circle and sent my own flurry of darts into the wall.
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Then I had another thought.
“Annabelle, can you show me the runes that relate to the different elements?”
“Sure.” She took a fresh sheet of paper and drew each a rune for each affinity. “Now, these are just the basic runes. There are more advanced ones that modify—”
“Basic’s good enough” I said, cutting her off in my excitement to test out my idea.
I recast the dart swarm spell, only this time I incorporated the rune for Fire into its formation. Sure enough, the darts it produced were now flaming. It lacked the precision of the spell Annabelle cast, though. Many of the darts were small and feeble, and instead of flying straight as a cluster they shot off in all directions. One of them landed on the table right in front of Akari and set fire to a stack of papers.
“Watch it!” she said, patting the flames out before they spread. “Now you see why Annabelle needs this containment room. Experimenting with rune formations like that can have unexpected results until you get the fine tuning down.”
Annabelle got off her stool and started shuffling toward the door. “I think I need to go lie down for a bit. I’ve got some stuff to process.”
“Yeah,” Akari said, watching me warily. She could probably tell by looking at me that I was considering trying it again with a different affinity. “A break might be a good idea right about now.”
“Do you mind if I stay here and study runes a bit?” I could’ve used a rest too, but who knew if I’d ever have an opportunity like this again.
“Knock yourself out,” Annabelle said.
When we reconvened up on the arena floor a few hours later, the sisters seemed to be in better spirits. They must have finished processing. I'd leveled up both Magical Theory and my new sorcery power while learning a bunch of new runes and formations so I was also feeling pretty chipper myself.
“Daniel,” Annabelle said before we even had a chance to settle in, “how many things can you do at the same time?”
“You mean how many powers can I have going at once? I don’t know. I think I’ve had maybe four or five up at the same time before? The limiting factor is my mana. Running multiple concurrent abilities really zorches through it fast.”
“Five or six?” Akari said, her eyes taking on a look that gave me the shivers. I didn’t know why it made me feel like that, but I also had the feeling I’d find out soon enough.
“What about elemental effects?” Annabelle said.
“I haven't done more than three at a time through Affinity Control, but I haven’t really tested my limits.”
“This is a problem,” Annabelle said.
“On what world?” Akari said, flabbergasted. “How is being able to juggle that many abilities at once a problem?”
“His insane versatility makes things a lot more complicated. I don’t know where to begin, there’s too much he can do.”
“But you must have experience with this kind of thing,” I said. “With your sorcery you must know lots of spells, how many can you have running at the same time?”
“Most sorcerers can only maintain one formation at a time, maybe two. I’m able to do two no problem, sometimes three if none of them are too complicated, so there are only so many combinations I can pull off.”
“With him, the combos are practically limitless,” Akari said. “I get it. So where do we start?”
“Well, I actually had an idea during our break and I think it will solve your problem,” I said. “How about coming up with possible problems or scenarios and figuring out what needs to be done to solve them, then finding the right combination of abilities to accomplish that?”
“That was actually the fun idea I had before,” Akari said, giving her forehead a smack. “Told you I’d forget it.”
“You’re right,” Annabelle said. “I was stuck thinking about what you can do instead of figuring out what you need to do. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Akari clapped her hands together. “Right on, then. Let’s get this party started.”
They wasted no time coming up with various scenarios which the arena would then create out of nowhere. I learned that there were complicated formations enchanted onto objects buried under the floor that could not only replicate monsters and other opponents, but also reproduce realistic physical environments as well. Which explained why I was unable to copy the arena’s power to reproduce opponents: it wasn’t technically a power, it was a formation. Now that I knew sorcery, I'd be able to do it.
I resolved then and there to absolutely learn those formations someday and make my own holodeck in the labyrinth. It’d be perfect for my own practice as well as training the monsters in my dungeons in better ways to deal with pesky teams of Players. Not to mention its sundry recreational uses.
As they came up with various challenges and the arena reproduced them, it was my job to come up with a fitting combination of abilities to tackle them. Even though I had the distinct impression I was being tested, it was soooo much fun.
Annabelle’s challenges were kind of random and situational, like how I’d win an absurd race I didn’t earn the right to compete in to get a golden cup out of a ridiculous hedge maze that made no sense, while Akari’s mostly centered on fighting, like how I’d handle an expert archer who whose main attack was to shoot their bow quickly and accurately while constantly moving in unpredictable patterns.
I thought I had done a good job of covering the bases with my abilities, and most of the time — or at least a lot of the time — I could pull off the effects needed to solve the problems the sisters dreamed up, or close enough. But there were many times when they stumped me, or it took me so long to cobble together the right abilities that I’d already be dead, or worse. Too many times. Soon, my supposedly well-rounded set of abilities was riddled with holes still to plug.
After a while, they started getting comfortable with the set of abilities I was working with and where my limits were, and we all began brainstorming ways I could achieve the goals. Working together we could often come up with solutions even to the ones I couldn’t solve by myself. Then it became a game to see whose solution was most efficient, time-wise and mana-wise.
If there was a problem we couldn’t collectively solve with existing abilities, it went onto a list of powers to synthesize or skills to seek out.
And that’s how I found myself under the tutelage of a pair of S-Rankers, because I was quick to learn that Annabelle had definitely been holding back in the Cathedral. If she was merely Expert in her sorcery power then I’d eat my shorts. Between the abilities they’d implied were missing to the totally out of whack mastery levels, it was clear to me that their Statuses were big fat lies.
I already knew that the sisters were special, but it made me wonder if maybe there were lots of NPCs out there with false Statuses I’d have no way of knowing about. Regardless, they somehow had a way of hiding their true abilities from All Can Be Revealed. I couldn’t get too irked about it, though, because after all, so did I.